Mark Zuckerberg recently announced efforts to clean up Facebook’s act.

The AP’s Frank Bajak urges us to take that announcement with several pounds of salt. He suggests that it’s Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes for a shifting strategy from the Zuckerborg for assimilating its victims users. Here’s a bit from his report:

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Use computers to do what you want, not what someone else wants you to do. Learn how to use GNU/Linux and its plethora of free and open source software to get stuff done with computers.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room (map). (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.

In other words, after you connect a light fixture to Alexa, Amazon wants to know every time the light is turned on or off, regardless of whether you asked Alexa to toggle the switch. Televisions must report the channel they’re set to. Smart locks must keep the company apprised whether or not the front door bolt is engaged.

Ever since the Opera browser introduced its Speed Dial over a decade ago, I’ve been a fan of “speed dials.” If you haven’t used one, a “Speed Dial” enables you to put links to favorite websites in the “new tab” page of your browser. (I stopped using Opera when it went to the Dark Side.)

For a while I used Seamonkey, because, like the old Opera, it included an email client, an RSS reader, and a newsreader. I quite like Seamonkey, but, since the Seamonkey sync is broken and I use multiple computers, I now rely on Firefox as my default browser.

I recently stumbled over a “speed dial” for Firefox called “Quick Dial” which I quite like for two primary reasons: It will sync in a normal Firefox sync without your having to create some account on somewhereyouneverheardof.com, and it allows you to select a background image from your own images library.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Use computers to do what you want, not what someone else wants you to do. Learn how to use GNU/Linux and its plethora of free and open source software to get stuff done with computers.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room (map). (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.

Quick Dial will sync as part of a normal Firefox sync. You don’t have to create an account at somewebsite.com the provenance of which you know nothing.

It allows you to choose a background image from your own image library, but the backgrounds will not sync; they must be selected locally on each machine.

Quick Dial also gives you more options for configuring the appearance of the individual dials than I have encountered with any other speed dial plugin. For example, you can change the labels of the individual dials, as well as the color of their font and background. This is useful when the default title is “All the News You Can Use | Some City’s Newspaper”; that can be edited down to “Some City’s Newspaper.”

I like it so much that I kicked in a small donation to the maintainer and you can too.

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